All the Roads That Lead From Home (16 page)

Lander
peered down her front and pretended not to. He did it quickly, with a fast,
practiced drop of the eyes. He’d done a lot of looking at her that he’d tried
to hide. She’d used it growing up, a power she had over him.
Tell me this
and I’ll show you that
. What she’d wanted to know was always about their
father, what he’d said about her, what he’d do next where she was concerned.
What she got for her trouble were things like
he loves me better
and
he
says I’m a lot smarter than you
, pain she left on the bodies she marked for
life, and in the ears of young men who shared her bed before Vic came along.
One of them, whose name might have been Brian or Brad, had said of Lander’s foibles,
Hey, it takes two to tango, you know.

Dunston
came into view. The family house the same, the bushes crushed by snow. Paula’s
daughter, Debbie, at the door, little changed, still childlike with her small,
sullen mouth. Paula in the kitchen, her bony fingers like claws around her
glass, her eyes sunken in her once beautiful face. She and Lander embraced.
Then Paula turned to Cory and Vic and looked at them as if they were mist or
smoke, something temporary and inclined to form a lazy, useless swirl.

“How is he
today?” Lander asked Paula.

“Same.
Quiet. Wants to see you. Both of you. Especially Cory.”

“I bet,”
said Cory.

Paula
stared up into Vic’s face. “I can make up the couch for you. It’s not very
comfortable, but I’ll do my best.”

“He stays
with me,” said Cory.

“Oh. Well.
Of course. Only, I don’t know what your poor father would think.”

“He’d
think I’m an adult.”

Paula
nodded. Her face was pinched. She was crying, Cory realized. She’d never, in
her entire life, seen Paula cry.

The bed
they slept in that night was her old one, in a different place now, a spare
room off her father’s first floor study. The same bed she and Lander had woken
up in together years before, naked, hung over, neither knowing then or later if
they’d committed an act of incest. Debbie discovered them. Paula and their
father were out of town, at a conference in New York City, and Lander and Cory
were given this one chance to prove their responsibility as teenagers and keep
an eye on their ten-year-old charge, the house, and the crabby, arthritic dog
who needed to be helped down the front stairs several times a day to piss and
shit in the yard. What they did was raid the liquor cabinet, send Debbie to
bed, and forget about the dog, who made a mess all over Paula’s Persian rugs. They
played a game of strip poker, which Cory lost, leaving her to sit shivering and
naked before Lander who wouldn’t let her dress. She challenged him to shots of
whiskey to see who could drink the most and still function. After that she
remembered nothing except Debbie shoving her awake to say the dog needed to go
out. Lander and Cory both bribed her to keep quiet, not about their night
together, which they denied even to themselves, but about the rest of it. She
didn’t. She went straight to Paula and blabbed the whole story, mad that she’d
been exiled to her room when they’d promised they’d all stay up and watch late
night movies with popcorn. Their father assumed it was Cory’s doing, that she’d
lured her brother into bed and God alone knew what else, and it was then she
who was exiled. The school in Vermont she attended for her last two years of
high school was expensive, almost beyond his means, but he made the sacrifice
for the sake—and salvation—of his son, Lander. Cory never went home after that,
but fled to L.A. and built a world out of booze, sex, and her beloved tattoos.

***

Paula was talking to Cory
slowly, as if from a dream, one hand to her hair, her throat, and back again, a
sleepwalker recalling a gracious gesture, perhaps on entering a room where the
faces were turned her way and the smiles all meant for her.

Lander was
pushing for hospice care, she said, thinking it was better to bring him home.
The trouble was, he didn’t want to come home, didn’t want to be a burden to
anyone, wanted everyone to carry on without him and get used to his being gone.
Debbie, beside her mother on the waiting room’s vinyl couch, told Cory that she
too had urged Cory’s father in this direction, with no luck. Paula asked Cory
what could be taking so long, and Debbie told Cory it was probably nothing
important, another sponge bath, or changing the sheets. Talking through her was
new, Cory thought. Once they spoke around her, ignoring her altogether,
sometimes referring to her in the third person.
She thinks you don’t know
who got into your wallet,
and
Go on, honey, tell me what she did this
time
, Cory sometimes occupying the physical space between them and once
grabbing both mother and daughter by the arm and screaming,
I’m not fucking
invisible, you assholes!
She was no more visible now, really, only
necessary to keep in place the distance they seemed to need, for reasons she
didn’t want to know.

Lander
appeared in the hallway leading from their father’s room. He walked rigidly, as
if his back gave him an agony.

“He wants
to see Cory. Alone,” he said.

“Why?”
Cory asked.

“How
should I know? I’m just the messenger.”

“You want
I should hang out, or what?” Vic asked Cory. Debbie look startled at the sound
of his voice, as if she’d already forgotten his existence. She went on working
with whatever was in her hands, knitting, from the look of it.

“If you
want. I don’t know how long I’ll be,” said Cory.

“Fine with
me.”

Suddenly,
Cory was terrified. She collected her scarf and coat and went alone down the
hall. He lay by the window. He was the same, only pared down. Skin like paper,
skull clearly outlined, the fingernails translucent half-moons.

At the
sound of her steps he opened his eyes slowly. They were unfocused for a moment,
then settled sharply on her.

“Corrine.
Well.” His voice was faint, yet not weak, as if he could still get the
attention of the whole room if he wished to. His eyes traveled to her cropped
green hair, her face, and her bare arms revealed by a sleeveless blouse she’d
worn to show off the garden that trailed from bicep to wrist. “You’re quite the
sight.”

He didn’t
seem to expect any sort of embrace, or gesture of affection, and she made none.
She sat down, her crumpled wool coat—another thrift-store find—on her lap. He
gestured to her to press the button which raised the top half of the bed,
allowing him to sit up taller.

“What are
they?” he asked. He meant her tattoos.

“Lilies
here, and this is a rose, and on this side a daisy chain.”

“Very
lifelike. Your designs?”

“Yes.”

“Well.”

His eyes
closed, he exhaled slowly.
He’s in pain
, she thought.
A shitload of
pain
. No one had prepared her for that. They were probably all used to it
by now, since they converged on him daily according to Lander, but still
someone should have told her. That wasn’t how they did things, though. They’d
always expected her to fend for herself.

She waited
for him to continue, and he didn’t. Her gaze wandered. The window gave a wide
view of the hills sloping down to Lake Dunston—a view so lovely Cory wondered
how Paula had managed to arrange it, unless Debbie had. Debbie was absurdly
devoted to Cory’s father, principally because he’d funded a lot of her
nonsense, like taking a spiritual tour of India, living in an ashram for
several months, then coming back to Dunston and doing absolutely nothing except
toy with the notion of one day getting a career, perhaps as a social worker.
The snow resumed, and slowly the view was obscured. Cory shivered, although the
room was too warm.

She needed
a cigarette.

“I’ll be
right back,” she said.

His hand
found her wrist and held on with surprising strength.

“No,” he
said.

“Just a
quick cigarette break. It’s all right.”

“No. You
must
stay here. I need to speak to you.”

So, she
sat. Lunch was brought. Her father waved it away, and famished, Cory helped herself.
Rubbery slices of pale turkey, a flawless mound of mashed potatoes in which a
small depression was filled with gummy and delicious gravy. The green beans
were cold and chewy, but she ate those, too, and the small square of apple
turnover that served as dessert. She looked inside her purse, hoping the extra
serving of whiskey she’d gotten on the plane was still there, and it was. She
opened the tiny bottle, and drank it quickly.

“Your
mother—” her father said. He sighed, cleared his throat, swallowed with
difficulty, and continued. He wasn’t able to properly express his affection
towards her; he’d lived in fear that he would always disappoint her, not live
up to her as an equal—she was a brilliant woman in her own right, did Cory know
that? Not academically, but in the way she saw inside people, understood them
quickly and completely. It scared him. Sensing his withdrawal, she, too
withdrew and grew cold, long before she died.

Paula was
entirely different, he said. She was dense, oblivious, in her own world, yet
she always held him in the highest esteem. It meant total freedom. When you can
do no wrong, he explained, then you are at liberty to do anything you please.
And he did. Money he shouldn’t have spent; insulting comments about Paula’s
cooking while she presided over their table with grace; affairs with students
he kept quiet except for one that went too far, the student calling the house,
banging on the door, tracking them down in restaurants. He denied it to Paula,
said the girl was disturbed, obsessed, completely deranged, which a subsequent
suicide attempt confirmed. Paula believed him.

“Maybe she
just pretended to,” said Cory.

“Same
result. I was off the hook.”

He spoke
next of Debbie, her inability to get traction in life, a fundamental laziness
that prevented her from evolving. Her mother had left her emotionally isolated,
and she’d turned to Cory’s father for support, for love she had to have. He
couldn’t give it to her. She was sweet in her way, and he was fond of her, yet
found he couldn’t love her. That was his defect as a person, he supposed, and
something he was powerless to change.

A nurse
appeared to record some numbers from one of the monitors connected to Cory’s
father by plastic tubing. Cory felt the liquor now, and wished she had more.
The nurse was tall and stocky with thick arms, a no-nonsense gal with a heart
of gold.

“You doing
okay?” she asked Cory. Cory knew she smelled of whiskey. The old sense of
exposure, of being found out.

 “Fine,
thank you.” Up straighter in her seat. One hand gliding through her emerald
hair to keep it smooth. “But I think he might need something,” she said.

Nurse Huge
turned his way. “Mr. Giles? Can I bring you anything?”

A head
feebly shaken. A sympathetic glance exchanged between the women in the room.

The nurse
then bent down to Cory and whispered, “You’re all he needs, all he’s asked for
these last weeks, God bless you for being here, for coming such a long way.”

“Further
than you know.”
But she was gone, that good nurse, on to some other
sufferer, and Cory was sure she hadn’t heard.

“What?”

“Nothing,
Dad. Just talking to myself.”

“You used
to.”

“No.
You’re thinking of Lander.”

Alone in
his room, his voice stopping, then starting over, as if rehearsing a part in a
play, only the play was his own life,
she is pretty, yes, oh, she is pretty,
is she as pretty as the one who got sick and died, do you mean your mother, I
mean nothing, oh, then nothing makes you mean,
his wordplay brilliant,
scary, tragic.

“He’s—unbalanced,”
her father said, then added that Lander had tried all his life to regiment
things to cover his own foibles. He was rigid, uncompromising, lived in a
little box because it was safe. His mind was reliable enough, but his spirit
was wild, destructive, untrustworthy. He was as hard as stone, yet without the
slightest degree of self-control.

What
about me?
Cory wondered. She’d been a
madwoman herself. Bouncing from passion to passion, full of nothing but bitter
dust. She came back to Dunston only for revenge, she realized, to sit by her
dying father and remind him of all the hurt she’d suffered. He was the one
suffering, though. Who had suffered, perhaps as much as she.

“He always
admired you in a way I found—disturbing,” her father said.

Cory
crushed her scarf in both hands. “Well, he—”

“It became
dangerous as you grew older. I’d hoped nothing would come of it, but I was
wrong.”

Cory
released her scarf. The liquor was stale in her mouth.

“So I sent
you away.” He swallowed. “I saw the harm that might come to you otherwise.”

It is
necessary for me to separate you from your brother, and that’s the only
explanation I will make.
She’d begged to
stay, not wanting to leave her few friends and oddly enough, even Lander.
Lander might have known her father’s mind. His letters to her were overly kind.
Everyone misses you, even Debbie, though she’s too snotty to say so.
The
kindness faded in time, replaced with neutral updates on the family, and later,
as she responded by detailing the seediness of her life, contempt.